Reunion (23 page)

She dropped her shoes by the wall, saying, “I’ll just be a minute.” Then she stepped past the gate and disappeared into the shadows.

He sat down on the curb to wait, resting his arms on his knees, his chin on his arms. The scent of jasmine was strong. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Would it always transport him, as it was doing now, to his teenage summers? Long days empty of purpose, when he longed for everything he couldn’t name and rejected everything he could?

He pushed away the memory, thinking instead of being here, on the curb of a house that would soon be occupied by Blue Reynolds, of how bizarre it was to have her walking barefooted through the wild garden
just behind him. How it was only thirty-six or so hours ago that he was sitting on the edge of his bare cot, packing his gear, imagining her as a lovely-but-fire-breathing dragon. Obviously she was no dragon. If anything, she was more like a lamb.

A very, very wealthy lamb. A lamb with a hugely popular television show. A lamb who might yet gambol her way into the Forrester pasture, but not in any way he would find endearing.

ive am came too early for Blue. The alarm clock made a startling reminder that during the few hours she’d managed to sleep, Branford had been en route to some small West Virginia town where Meredith Harper—not Jones, he’d learned—had died from pancreatic cancer. The obituary said she’d moved there with her husband and daughter twenty years earlier. The husband died a few years later, the daughter was apparently still unmarried. He planned to drop in at the daughter’s unannounced. “I find it’s the most effective strategy in these kinds of situations,” he’d said.

She shut off the alarm and pulled a pillow over her face, held it there, then threw it onto the floor.

If she’d slept even three hours she’d be surprised. And what time she had slept was spent in the repeating loop of a dream she’d had before. She’d been at her mother’s childhood home, her own first home, the one with the tiny yard. Or it seemed to be that house; she had no true memory of it, had only ever seen bits of it in faded three-by-three Polaroids.

In the dream, she lived there with only her grandma Kate; always they were rolling out pie dough. Blue’s palms were tight, dry, coated with flour, and everything she tried to grasp slipped from her hands. A pie tin, a glass of water … She tried to turn doorknobs but couldn’t. Her grandma leaned over the table, rolling, rolling … her blue polyester pants were loose across her thin backside; Blue knew she was ill,
and tried to phone the doctor, only to have the phone slip and drop to the floor.

Sometimes the dream ended here. Other times, like last night, she would dream that she was waking, a thick confusion where she discovered she was in her mother’s bed and her mother was still out. So she’d turn over, go back to sleep, and wake again, but not really wake, and her mother would still be gone.

So the alarm was a relief, but the reality it brought was an anxious one. What would Branford learn? Would it get her any closer to her wish? Every possibility seemed equally possible and improbable. When would she hear from him next? And what if some radical terrorist group succeeded in nuking major U.S. cities, knocking out all communications before he called? What if it already had, and the news just hadn’t made it here yet?

“Now
that’s
likely,” she said, sitting up and untwisting her nightshirt. Even if no one else on the island was tuned in to the larger world—which if the Green Parrot’s crowd was any indication, was not as farfetched as it might sound—Peter would be. With his earpiece phone and his does-everything palm device, he was like a walking media receiver. Janelle said he was up and checking the news at five o’clock all seven days of the week.

The image of an entire nation of media junkies in chaos remained with Blue as she used the bathroom and then went to the armoire to choose clothes for the day. Linen shorts again, and maybe the violet tee …

Violet, like Julian’s eyes.

Julian. He was not at all what she’d been expecting. He seemed like an old soul, maybe because he’d seen so much. Too much, probably, but she admired him for it. And while he’d been reserved—even antisocial—at the Green Parrot, he was much less so afterward. She’s been expecting
difficult, rigid, stubborn
, but got funny and thoughtful instead.

She chose a sea-glass green shirt and closed the door.

There were worse places to ride out a crisis than the spit of land she was on right now. Imagine, no cell phone service, no television, no
radio … nothing but warm days under blue skies, a horizon of palms and sea … she hadn’t tried coconut milk yet, but it might be good; she was open to it being good. Here, on a lounge chair with the sun browning her usually protected skin, there was a chance she would be able to forget everything that bound her to the mainland. In the shade of her new home’s trees, she could while away the days with fresh pineapple juice and all the books she’d been wanting to read since forever.

Of course, everyone she cared most about would be safe—her mother (and Calvin, to keep her mother happy); Mel and Jeff and the boys;
her
boy, wherever he was—because she’d know if something had happened to any of them, the same way the Baltimore woman she’d had on the show last spring had known the precise moment her twin brother was killed in a small plane accident. Blue had been skeptical of the woman’s account when Peter first brought up the program idea, but it had proved out.

If you were paying attention, the woman claimed, you could tune in to all kinds of things. Music on nearby radio stations, TV broadcasts, even other people’s thoughts—not mind reading per se, but “perceptive awareness,” she’d called it. Blue hadn’t said so, but she’d had one somewhat similar experience of her own: Three years before, she’d fallen asleep on a flight to London and dreamt of a grand house with a lake view, a white canvas tent set up on a clipped lawn, a party underway; a young man in cap and gown stood on the flagstone walk, welcoming an old man in a fine navy suit. It was nothing like her usual dreams—no story, no muddled emotions. She’d awakened certain that she had seen her son, a vision, not a dream. She was so persuaded of this truth that a week later she’d hired Branford, to prove it.

Whereas last night’s dream persuaded her of nothing except to drink less before bed.

She phoned down to the restaurant for room service. Grapefruit juice and a hard-boiled egg would do. Then she checked her email, half hoping Branford had jumped protocol and sent her some kind of optimistic update.
Made it to West Virginia, found M’s daughter waiting up
with files in hand.
He hadn’t; in fact, everything in her inbox was work-related, except for one message from her mother. The subject line read, “Gone Fishin’” and there was an attachment. Probably junk, but with her mother, she never knew for sure. She opened the message.

We had a whim. See pic. Much love.

The attachment, a photo, showed her mother and Calvin sitting side-by-side in a painted gondola, a canal stretching out behind them. Her mother’s hand trailed in the water.

Venice. Their whim was
Venice.

What was their world coming to, when her mother was running off to Italy with a man she’d only just met at the same time Blue was spending two million dollars on a house she’d only just seen? A house she’d visited last night in a dreamy mist, with a man she would not think about further. A house only a half-mile away from Mitch’s parents’.

She hoped she and her mother both knew what they were doing.

When her breakfast arrived, she was showered and dressed and ready, more or less, to face the day. She would spend the morning helping Mitch with the
Lions
pilot in whatever ways she could, then meet Lila Shefford at the closing attorney’s office at one. They’d expedited everything. Her own lawyer had overnighted the check; all she had to do was show up and write her name a few times, and then Lila would hand over the keys. Just like that, she’d own her fifth home.

Melody might be willing to stay at this one. That Jeff didn’t fly had been Mel’s excuse for why they had never accepted her offers to use any of her homes when she wasn’t there. Blue was sure, though, that Mel preferred to avoid feeling like the poor relative, unable to enjoy what Blue had because she was preoccupied by what she and Jeff had not. Mel couldn’t have any objections to staying in a charming, unassuming house in Key West; despite its cost, it was no finer than Mel and Jeff’s house, and half the size. An ideal place for a couple who could finally vacation without their children.

How good it would feel to call her sister that minute, share her excitement about the house and offer the use of it. She wished she felt she could make such a call. Wished Mel were not so threatened by her success.
Why did Mel undervalue the riches of her own life—steady, true Jeff; two well-adjusted sons; a close-knit community that gathered often for fish boils and festivals and fund-raisers? Melody had a good, honest life, something to feel proud of.

In the beginning, Blue had been eager to share every success with her sister. When the show went into syndication and she bought her New York loft, she’d called Mel and Jeff to offer its use to them, thinking Mel would leap at the chance to stay free in New York. Before the farm, before Jeff, Mel had dreamed of designing edgy clothes, living in Greenwich Village, seeing shows off-off-Broadway and eating Chinese food every day. It was this goal, Mel had liked to say, that got her through the boring-ass days of her senior year. Then she’d met Jeff, and Jeff dreamed of owning his own spread, and Mel was so impressed with Jeff that she adopted his dream, dirt, weeds, worms, and all. Blue, though, was sure Mel hadn’t forgotten the appeal of New York. The day Blue’s offer on the Soho apartment got accepted, she’d call Mel and said, “It’s just a few blocks from where you used to want to live, remember? You and Jeff can stay there anytime you like—see the shows, order Chinese take-out—”

“I’m sure happy for you and that thirty-million-dollar salary raise you just got,” Mel said. “But
People
hasn’t run
my
story yet, on how we haven’t had rain in three months. It’s a dust bowl up here. Do you know what drought like this does to the beans? To our income? We’ll be lucky if we can keep the fuel oil tank filled this winter.”

“Oh. I didn’t—I mean, look, let me send you some—”

“I’m not looking for pity, and we don’t need anyone’s charity, Harmony Blue. We’ve got this far on our own, you know; two hundred acres isn’t a hobby farm.”

“It’s not charity. I have more money than I need, so why not—”

“I’m glad for you. Enjoy it. I gotta go.”

Mel was right to be cranky, Blue understood that. In her eagerness, she’d failed to see her sister’s point of view, failed to appreciate how widely the gulf had opened between them. She’d tried to be more considerate since then.

Unless something had changed Mel’s attitude—and Blue worried that years of plentiful rainfall and, now, a good lease deal with Green Giant wasn’t enough for that—this new house would, in Mel’s eyes, be just one more bauble for Blue’s collection. One more thing Blue didn’t need, one more extravagance highlighting their wildly divergent paths.

Suppose Mel knew the truth about what Blue
didn’t
have,
couldn’t
buy … ?

Then she’d know what a fraud her big sister was. Better to leave it alone.

“Onward,” she said, tucking her phone in her pocket and taking her egg to eat on the way.

loud cover filtered the morning sunlight, softening the lines of the shops and houses of Whitehead Street. The flora—she would have to check that guidebook, learn some plant names—seemed saturated with color. If she picked a leaf from a shrub and squeezed it, surely green would ooze through her fingers and drip onto the cool pavement.

From the sidewalk in front of the Hemingway Home’s entrance, she saw Julian standing in the open side yard, his back to her, adjusting a tripod. Balanced atop it was a small video camera—smaller by far than what her crew used. She couldn’t see Mitch yet, nor any of her crew, though the presence of light towers and a pair of screens suggested they were nearby.